CHRIS THURMAN: Exploring the contradictions of SA’s extreme past

After viewing Mikhael Subotzky’s new exhibition, “Home Building Ideas for South Africa (or a Cape Town Landscape)”, I kept thinking of Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons.

This classic of 19th-century Russian literature depicts children who are disillusioned with their parents’ politics but seem unwilling to examine their complicity in the ideologies of generations past.

The novel gives voice to the nihilist movement of the 1860s, the “sons” who rejected the ineffective or hypocritical liberalism of their “fathers”. It also questions the sons’ nihilism: radicalism spurred by narcissism, accompanied by a youthful disdain for their forebears that is generated from within the privilege they have inherited.

Much of Subotzky’s career has entailed a rigorous investigation of his own social status, what he describes as “attempts to be vulnerable and self-reflexive”, to “contribute in some small way to the deconstruction of white masculine power, rather than reinforcing it”.

This informed his early project, Die Vier Hoeke (2004), photographing inmates at Pollsmoor. The prison is not far from his old family home and is positioned in the heart of the affluent Cape peninsula: a manifestation, Subotzky notes, “of SA’s extreme and violent past” that is “literally across the road from idyllic wine farms”. This encapsulates Cape Town’s contradictions as “a split-personality post-apartheid city” but, he admits, it also says “something about my life”.

Exploring these contradictions has taken Subotzky back via the Big White Men of the 20th century (in Who’s Who, 2011) to an imagined or recreated colonial past (WYE, 2016). An important subject in his work over the past two decades is a figure named Hermanus, an ex-prisoner, who stands as a counterpoint to the messy business of whiteness.

In the present exhibition, it is Hermanus’ gaze that first meets the eye of the visitor to the Goodman Gallery in De Waterkant. Embedded in the viewer’s consciousness, this portrait recurs elsewhere in the exhibition, blurring with what appears to be a self-portrait (in Howls in the Bones of My Face) and with video footage and photos of the artist and his father (in Cello Piece). Hermanus thus becomes a kind of silent commentator on Subotzky’s intergenerational wrestle.

The cello installation features an instrument that Subotzky’s father played as part of a 1970s’ folk band — and on which he later taught his son to play. A projection onto the cello is accompanied by a recording of an obscure composition performed by the band. Subotzky has previously reflected on how his parents saw their participation in “the Cape Town Waldorf scene” (ignoring the racism in Rudolf Steiner’s writing) as “a kind of refuge from or refusal of apartheid”. In Cello Piece he takes this further, exposing “the neutered politics of hippie counterculture” that informed his upbringing.

Being unconventional does not automatically free one from a position of privilege that is sustained by social, economic and political conventions. Given Subotzky’s interest in “origin myths”, it is unsurprising that the major piece in this exhibition recalls that ur-figure (frontrunner) of unorthodox white liberalism in SA, Lady Anne Barnard.

Married to Andrew Barnard, secretary to the colonial governor — a post that his wife secured for him — Lady Anne lived in Cape Town from 1797-1802. As a writer and artist, she was a keen observer and a pithy commentator. She was horrified by the corruption of the colonial administration and the violence of slavery, and she broke with white society’s strict codes of racial segregation. Yet, for all her personal qualities, Lady Anne remained immersed in the British imperial project.

When the Barnards arrived in the Cape, they stayed in the barracks at the Castle of Good Hope, and Lady Anne was inspired by the view to paint an enormous panorama. In A Cape Town Landscape, Subotzky uses his idiosyncratic “sticky-tape” method to splice this image with photographs taken from the same spot.

We are presented, simultaneously, with two ways of seeing Cape Town’s (and, more broadly, SA’s) history and geography. One is the sublime mode, made possible only by wilful ignorance of injustice; the other accepts our country’s cruel contradictions. Turning away from Table Mountain, Subotzky’s lens reminds us that the view from the Castle includes the former “non-white” section of the train station and the makeshift shelters of homeless people.

“Home Building Ideas for South Africa (or a Cape Town Landscape)” is on at the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town until September 20. 

This column was originally published in Business Day.